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Former Virginia Gubernatorial Candidate Assaulted in Home
On 11/19/13, 10:18 PM, Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 11/19/2013 8:47 PM, wrote: On Tue, 19 Nov 2013 19:41:29 -0500, BAR wrote: The sad thing is that the kid, the one who offed himself, was released because they didn't have a bed in a pshyc facility available for him. I guess closing down all of the mental healht care facilities and releasing all of the nut jobs in the 70's served its purpose. That was mostly caused by a series of cases where the courts decided involuntary commitment equated to depriving a person of liberty and could only be imposed by due process. (14th amendment). Subsequent laws that defined "evaluations" further restricted exactly how long someone can be held with or without a court order. We don't know the details of this sad event, so this is pure speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me if drug and/or alcohol addiction is involved with Gus (the son) still in total denial. The early reports indicate he had been released from an area hospital Monday following a mental health evaluation. That could also have been an overnight "detox" period followed by the mental health evaluation. Getting a court order for involuntary commitment is difficult. Laws protect the rights of the person in question. A shrink's evaluation that the person "could" or "might" hurt himself or others is not sufficient in itself to cause a judge to order an involuntary commitment. The person has to actually hurt him/herself (attempt suicide) or cause injury to another person in order to be involuntarily committed in most circumstances. This was explained to me last year when I was involved in getting someone some help for severe alcoholism. The fact that the person in question had a blood alcohol level that is considered "lethal" (450) and had been driving a car in a reckless manner (endangering others) still wasn't sufficient. I was flabbergasted to learn this, but that's the law. If the person in question is still in a state of denial of their addiction, but hasn't actually hurt him/herself or anyone else, it's tough to have them involuntarily committed. My speculation is that this may be the case in this situation. If Gus had been determined to be an *immediate* threat to himself or others by virtue of demonstrated action, a bed would have been found. I would guess there are a couple of detox facilities out there in rural Virginia, but no real psych hospital. The dad had to be flown to Charlottesville for treatment of his knife wounds, which tells me there isn't even much of a general hospital out there. It's a lightly populated county. Here's a bit from another news report: Streeting...is an issue Virginia has struggled with before. In 2011, Virginia inspector general G. Douglas Bevelacqua released a report chastising the state for turning away in a month an estimated 200 patients determined to be a threat to themselves or others who met the criteria for a temporary detention, only because state facilities lacked the room to hold them. Twenty-three of Virginia’s 40 community-services boards acknowledged that “streeting” occurred at their facilities. “I wouldn’t say this happens every day, but it’s more common than we’d like for it to be,” Mary Ann Bergeron, the executive director of the Virginia Association of Community Services Board, told the Washington Post. Under Virginia’s emergency-custody-order process, the family of a patient petitions a magistrate to order an evaluation, and medical staff have a four-hour window to decide whether someone should be committed, according to Cropper, who declined to speak about the specifics of the Deeds case out of respect for the family’s privacy. The clock starts when a sheriff picks up the patient and brings him or her in for clinical evaluation. Once the evaluation is complete, physicians make a recommendation to the magistrate. If the magistrate approves, medical staff then search for an available hospital bed. It all has to happen during the four-hour time frame. “We can sometimes get an extension of two hours on that, but beyond the six hours we cannot. So if we don’t find a bed within six hours, then an individual would have to be released. We can’t keep them,” says Cropper. The availability of inpatient psychiatric care has decreased nationally in recent years. Research from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit focused on eliminating barriers to treatment of severe mental illness, found that the number of state psychiatric beds decreased nationwide by 14% between 2005 and 2010. In 2005 there were 50,509 state psychiatric beds nationwide, and in 2010 there were 43,318. It’s estimated that a person with severe mental illness is three times more likely to be in a state prison than a psychiatric hospital. Tightening state budgets have widened the gap in available beds. In the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting that claimed 32 lives, Virginia’s legislature took measures to revamp the emergency-evaluation processes, updated the criteria for involuntary psychiatric commitment and raised state funding for community mental-health services. But according to a report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Virginia’s overall state mental-health budget decreased $37.7 million dollars from $424.3 million to $386.6 million between fiscal years 2009 and 2012. “The consequences of not providing treatment should demonstrate the importance of the need for it,” says Kristina Ragosta, director of advocacy at the Treatment Advocacy Center. “Most people with mental illness are no more violent than the general population, but when we talk about people with untreated mental illness, they are at greater risk of committing violent acts.” -- The four to six hour window for evaluation in Virginia is an absurdity, especially in a rural area where there are not likely to be professionals qualified to evaluate potential psychiatric patients. Certainly a regular physician can tell if an individual is "raving," but I'm not sure they can evaluate a more difficult case. Psychiatric diagnosis depends upon more than accurately noting "visible" problems or the results of blood tests. |
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